Neuropolitics Notes

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Neuropolitics by William Connollyxiii

Politics not reducible to genetically wired brain responses.

Neuropolitics is politics through which cultural life mixes with into composition of body/brain processes, and vice-versa.

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Technique and discipline play critical role in thin ing, ethics and politics.

Thin ing has creative and compositional dimensions.

!reative" means by which new ideas and concepts come into being.

!ompositional" ways thin ing helps to shape brain connections, habits, sensibilities and corporealdispositions.

!annot ignore affective dimensions and somatic entanglements.

#nventive and creative dimensions of thin ing are essential to freedom of the self.

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Neuroscience and film as forwarding cultural theory.

#ssues engaged to advancing a form of political pluralism appropriate to acceleration of speed,compression of distance and multidimensional diversity.

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!ompression of distance refers to the time required to mobili$e people, ideas, newspapers, military, etcacross large spaces of territory.

%iology mixed into culture and thin ing, and nature folded into both. &very theory of culture hasrelation to biology.

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'here is neuroscience in the body/brain/culture relations(

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Three criticisms of neuroscience/culture intersection. ). Neuroscience experiments individual, culturecollective *. +ow denial, repression, etc can ta e place without traumatic brain in ury . Neurological

processes cannot capture the quality or essence of phenomenological experiences, even though theymay correlate.


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pdated mind-body fusion of pino$a with neuroscience.

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0ffect front and central in contemporary neuroscience.11

%rain can remap itself. &choes pino$a and 1erleau-Ponty in reconstituting its body image. 'hen thisis done, sensory stimuli are felt on different body parts.

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2ilm mobili$es affect and demonstrates how it can ta e place outside of celluloid world.

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0ccording to %ergson, sensory material must be substracted to enable action-oriented perception.

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Today many cultural and political theorists believe that politics and ethics should or do consist solely of deliberation.

!ritical theorists contest this but argue subliminal influences reducible to modes of manipulation or behavioural management to be overcome in a rational or deliberative society.

ome critici$e the enchantment of politics, others affirm it through constructed character of culture,nature, or desire.

The latter often do not go deep enough and instead loo at how layers become sedimented.

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!ulture constituted in part by the perceptions, beliefs, and concepts in it. Thought enters into it thesub ective and intersub ective dimensions. Tensions and dissonance can arrise.

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Techniques of the self and of micropolitics are critical to an expansive ethos of plurali$ation, and alsoclosed regimes exposed to such an ethos. They intervene at various points in between.

3!ontrast neurological understanding of affect with sublime(4

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2or %ergson, perception has two dimensions. The event you encounter and memory without


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recollection/virtual memory combine to turn encounter into a perception.

5irtual memory is also motor memory. &xists below level of explicit awareness to create motormovements and independent recollections.

Perception is quic as it must be in order to influence action.

Perception not pure and unmediated. 6uided by concerns of possible action, and rapid con unctions between action and event creating connections to other virtual memories.

7rgani$ation of perception renders it too slow for the pace of life.

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#n emergency, explicit image gives way to rapid information processing without image. The imagecomes after and you reali$e the action you too after the fact, i.e, reali$e you steered swiftly to avoid anoncoming car. !aused by crude but lightning fast processing of amygdala. #nfra-perception.

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Perception oriented to action and does not call attention to itself.

&ach virtual memory has a charge of affect within it. They are mobili$ed to mediate an encounter andturn sensation into experience. They move thin ing and udgement in one direction or aother, and thusthey are already underway before they enter consciousness.

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Neuroscience moving towards 8enactive9 model of the mind where brain systems dependent on bodily$ones of perception.

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omatic mar ers are culturally mobili$ed, corporeal dispositions through which affect-imbued, preliminary orientations to perception and udgement scale down the material factored into cost-benefitanalyses, principles udgements, and reflective experiments.

7perates below threshold of reflection and mixes in culture and nature into perception, thin ing and udgements: folds gut feelings into these mixtures.

+elps ma e decisions. 1a e it possible to perceive and decide in a timely manner. 0lso fold into thesubtractions and accentuation elements that can be dangerous, unwanted, or cruel li e a racial bias or

er ing wheel into an oncoming car.

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omatic mar ers not equivalent to biologically wired predispositions. +ave intersub ective andlinguistic elements mixed in to them.


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The virtual is action-oriented memories below explicit recollection at the moment, and also intensivetraces and fragments that have effects on udgement and consciousness in new encounters withoutthemselves being susceptible to explicit recollection.

Three layers of memory" ). &xplicit memories called up by existing situation *. Potential recollectionsthat operate implicitly in action-contexts because time too short to ta e form as reflections . &ffect of past on the present.

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!ultural pluralists adopt racial images of culture, ust as nativists and nationalists do. !ultural pluralists in ect biological concept of race into the base of culture.

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Nativists see racial purity while pluralists see racial diversity. +owever, they are still succepitble tocausing pluralist racism.

!ulture defined as concepts, beliefs and practices for 1ichaels ;who puts forward this concept of pluralism and nativisminguistic distinctionsmixed into affective states. 3No they are not. They are sensory4

>anguage ma es affect less brutish. 30ffect must be translated into language( Thin ing is linguistic4

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0ffect involved in process by which what is outside of thought is rendered inside thought.

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Process by which outside of thought enters into thought is 8magical9

Thought not restricted to individual. 0ffect across bodies.

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Thoughts invested with affects. This explains why we are so loyal to thoughts.

Becent neuroscience demonstrates the indispensable aspect of affect to thought.

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Begion in the breast that communicates with the brain to convey intense feelings of fear, anxiety, terror,disgust. Thin ing mixed in with these intensities. ome felt, some below level of feeling.

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0esthetic udgements falls under urisdiction of supersensible realm. To udge something beautiful is toattain a spontaneous accord of the faculties that expresses the dictates of the supersensible realmwithout being able to conceptuali$e them.

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Naturalism refers to idea that all human activities function without aid of divine or supernatural forces.

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This naturalism goes against lawli e model of nature in classical natural science. &mphasi$es howculture gets differentially mixed into natural processes.

&liminative naturalism is a philosophy that reduces the experience of consciousness to non-conscious processes.

1echanical naturalism denies any role to a supersensible field while finding both human nature andstructure of human brain to be in principle to precicse representation and complete explanation.

These two types of naturalism not prominent today.

#mmanent naturalism does not refute the transcendental but places it in a field where nature and cultureare mixed.

!onsciousness emerges as a layer of thin ing, feelings, and udgement bound to complex operationsthat enable and exceed it.

#mmanent field not immaterial. #t is infrasensual.

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=eleu$e an immanent naturalist.

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Thin ing is defined as the activities through which conclusions and udgements are reached and newconnections among ideas are generated.

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0mygdala enters intensities into thin ing.

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!onceptual connections formed in conscious thin ing are notoriously irreducible to casual explanation,and the rapid, parallel systems that both affect udgement directly and pro ect thought-imbuedintensities into consciousness may be too fast and variable in intensity to submit to close, situationalcomputation as well.

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8@now-how9 over propositional nowledge. 1oving away from calculative, information processingmodel of the mind.

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=eleu$e pro ects a virtual register of proto-thoughts that are too fast for either conscious self-inspectionor close third-person retrieval. 1eshes with consideration how affective tendencies in thought propel in


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one direction or another.

=eleu$e reads @ant:s governance of thought as saying thought inspired, terrori$ed, or nudged intoaction by strange encounters.

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0ffect imbued thin ing already underway, for =eleu$e, by time consciousness emerges to pull it in onedirection or another.

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Thin ing involves synthesis in the present between a constructed past and a yet to be consolidatedfuture.

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0n ethical sensibility is composed through cultural layeing of affect into the materiality of thought.Thought imbued intensities below level of feeling, and thought imbued feelings below level oflinguistic sophistication. 3>iteral reading of feeling(4 #mages trigger responses at both levels, and createlinguistic narratives, arguments, and udgements.

3!onnolly attempts to maintain rationalist model of deliberation, and also the individual.4

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1icropolitics in =eleu$ian sense refers to a cultural collectivi$ation and politici$ation of arts of theself. 3or does it go below the self(4

0pplies tactics to layers of intersub ective being. 7ften mobili$ed in competitive situations thus givingit an agonistic aspect.

0rts of the self. 'e can mediate our ontological state to some regard. 3!ounter to the event(4

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Cou can choreograph yourself for particular affective or non-affective outcomes.

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2reud:s interpretation of 1oses as a counter-story to the official one filtered through the 7ld Testament.

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!ollective memory derived from sacred text.

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1emory traces are fragments that does not ta e form of an explicit recollection. They are enough li e a


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thought to affect linguistically sophisticated thoughts and udgements.

#t is too fast to be recollected, but can be interpretted in psychoanalysis.

Trauma can cause traces. ight or smell triggers the trace bac to a painful memory.

1221emory traces are virtual, meaning real without being actual. They exert effects without being refinedenough to be direct ob ects of inspection.

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Beligious experience below level of intellectual consciousness, but radiates. 3%iological(4

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%iological rooting of mystical states. 0re some people more biologically able to have mysticalexperiences than others(

0mygdala not of concern when it comes to emotions li e disgust and happiness.

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1ystical states have absolute authority over the individual in which they exist. They brea downauthority of non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness based on understanding and the senses.

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!ontemporary culture characteri$ed by a fast pace of innovation, change and replacement throughobsolution. 2ast pace of fashion and war threaten democratic politics.

Thin ing, culture, and ethics are stratified processes.

&thical udgement underway before you tend to it consciously.

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Time contains rifts where the future for s into new and unexpected directions. #t is in this rift where becoming ta es place ? where new flows surge into being. Politics is rendered both possible anddangerous in the rift

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0liens not only those within a country without citi$ens rights, but also those beings coded as strangewhose presence is threatening to 8natives.9

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0rtistry is when people act upon themselves to become what they are. =erived from Niet$sche.

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Niet$sche equates difference between conscious and nonconscious thin ing with that between generalcultural orientations and thought-imbued intensities unique to each individual.

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!ultural insub ectivities becomes mixed into corporeal habits through affectional ties.

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Pro ection into future or established udgement of conduct can be thrown into crisis by unexpectedevents or new movements in the politics of becoming.

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Duestion of speed indebted to Paul 5irilio, who enters speed into considerations of global politics.5irilio says when speed accelerates, space is compressed.

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@ant:s era was characteri$ed by slow pace.

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+uman agency insufficient to reali$e @ant:s cosmopolitan ideal. low pace of history allows @ant tosupersede human agency.

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nli e @ant who believes western civili$ation has a universali$ing property, +uttington believes'estern !ivili$ation transcends a particular state and must be protected from migration.

2or @ant and +untington, culture emerges in the individual and radiates to the nation through thefamily.

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#n fast paced world, The 'est cannot be self-sustaining.

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Cou may associate with people more on a global level further away from you then those in your ownneighbourhood.

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